(Video) Roseanne Barr vs Jimmy Kimmel: The battle America deserves

Jazz ShawPosted at 10:41 am on March 26, 2018

The reboot of Roseanne is almost upon us, which means that Barr and her costar, John Goodman, are making the rounds of late night talk shows and promotional events. Her character is, by all accounts, an unabashed Trump supporter. How much of a supporter Roseanne is in real life may be up for debate, but some of those characteristics seem to be carrying over when the cameras are off. That happened when she showed up on set with Jimmy Kimmel and he brought up the whole Trump support thing. Rather than finding a willing ally in the Trump-bashing circus, Barr wound up reading Kimmel the riot act. (Washington Examiner)

Jimmy Kimmel’s anti-Trump shtick met its match in Roseanne Barr on Thursday. In an interview promoting the revamp of her eponymous sitcom, Barr took Kimmel to task for suggesting her values had shifted because she supports President Trump.

“I’m shocked … because I know you were a very socially liberal person in general,” the host said.

“I’m still the same! You all moved,” Barr exclaimed. “You all went so fucking far out, you lost everything.”

Kimmel laughed, quipping back, “You’re probably right, by the way.”

But Barr wasn’t finished. “I just want to say this, Jimmy,” she continued. “A lot of us, no matter who we voted for, we don’t want to see our president fail … Because we don’t want Pence!” Barr added.

Here’s the video. The actual Kimmel interview starts around the 40-second mark and the fireworks kick off shortly thereafter, starting with some barbs about Hillary Clinton and then moving on to the Trump stuff.

As I sort of alluded to above, whether you’re looking at this interview or watching Barr’s Twitter feed, it’s kind of hard to figure out where the character ends and the opinions of the actual actress begin. And she certainly doesn’t lend herself to some easily identified, partisan pigeonhole. She defends the election of Donald Trump and reminds Kimmel that some people want the president (and the nation) to succeed no matter who wins. But then she turns around and claims that Vice President Mike Pense would be a disaster as President so that’s a reason to keep Trump in office.

Who knows? When she tells some stories about her personal life and her children, she certainly sounds sincere. She claims that one of her daughters began openly weeping on election night (which we saw plenty of), fretting that Trump was going to, “deport all our gays” or something, and she told her to just chill out and wait and see what happens.

While I was at least partly joking with the title of this post, maybe this was exactly the fight America needed to see on late-night comedy shows. Kimmel lives in an echo chamber of liberal outrage. Having some die-hard MAGA activist on the show wouldn’t settle anything, assuming they were even invited. But Roseanne remains this quirky character who draws a big audience from across the ideological divide. If anyone was going to smack Kimmel down in a way which might resonate, it was probably her.